Read each quote and see if you can identify its author’s cultural origin

Congratulations!

You have just helped us to demonstrate that, in fact, it isn’t easy to tell the difference between Chinese and Western points of view. Many of the views and attitudes we think of as “Western” show up in the Chinese record at one time or another, and vice-versa, depending on changes in historical circumstances.

Quote

Western

Chinese

1.

“Take from man his selfish propensities and he can have nothing to seduce him from the practice of virtue. Or subdue those propensities by education, instruction or restraint, and virtue remains without a competitor.”

2.

“Government can be successfully administered only when it is in accord with the people’s will. When a government fails it is because it opposes the people’s will.”

3.

“If politicians were less blinded by ambition . . . they would realize that political authority has its main source of power in the citizen’s hearts, and that in the maintenance of government nothing can replace public morality.”

4.

“The sovereign imposes his attitudes on the court, the court on the town, and the town on the provinces; his mind is the pattern which determines the shape of all the others.”

5.

“Law does not come from the heaven . . . It develops in society, and resides in the people’s hearts.”

6.

“I write to express my own mind, and paint to suit myself, that is all.”

7.

“The poetry of painting simply consists in the apt expression of the artist’s own feeling.”

8.

“[Subjects held in fear by a tyrant are like water] which, having once found an outlet, flows out with all the more force if it has previously been contained by force.”

9.

“If a river is dammed up and bursts its dikes, the number of people killed will be large…[Likewise’ in governing the people one releases them from constraints and provides for open speech as an outlet..”

10.

“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.”

11.

“I have never been one to suit the world against my own wishes. Though stricken with hunger and cold, to go against myself would only make me sick.”

12.

“The bonds of blood are like the leaves and branches of trees; they shoot forth and sprout, in mutual support. Within the four seas, all men are brothers; who then is a
stranger, and who is not?”

13.

“Why should we assume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood? All men have my blood and I have all men’s.”